Estimating the magnitude of differential discipline in gender nonconforming youth in the ABCD Study

Youth receive subtle and overt messages from parents, teachers, and peers regarding what classifies as gender typical behavior. Across early education, these experiences accumulate such that gender minority adolescents report elevated rates of bullying and general hostile school environments. Youth of color and sexual minorities receive heightened surveillance and experience exclusionary discipline (i.e., detentions or suspensions) due to experiences of victimization (e.g., fighting a bully) or minor infractions (e.g., dress code violations), suggesting that students who “stick out” relative to their context may be at risk of receiving differential discipline. The extent to which such evidence generalizes to gender nonconformity or other gender-related social categories (e.g., transgender, nonbinary) is unclear. Using data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study (n = 11,868 adolescents; average age at baseline ≈ 10 years old; followed annually across 4 waves), the present study examined disparities in exclusionary discipline between gender conforming and nonconforming youth. Overall, gender nonconforming youth were less likely to experience exclusionary discipline, but conditional on ever receiving discipline, were suspended more frequently. Further, I found that gender nonconforming youth received a higher number of suspensions for attendance and academic reasons, though they were not more likely to ever be suspended for these reasons. Overall, my results build on past work regarding the relationship between gender and exclusionary discipline by highlighting the contrasting findings between the likelihood of ever receiving a suspension/detention and the total number of suspensions/detentions.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.S.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Psychology

Grantor

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2025

Author dc:creator

• Woosley, Allison Mae

Contributors dc:contributor

• Briley, D. A.
• Derringer, Jaime

• gender
• gender nonconformity
• school discipline
• suspensions
• abcd study

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2025 Allison Woosley

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/129239

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F129239